Celebrating Teacher Appreciation with Our Top Seven EQ Competencies of Professional Teaching

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”

– Neil Postman (1931 – 2003)

Instructor, Teacher, Professor, Provost, Principal, Superintendent. Do they differ? Sure, what we call ourselves is helpful to define roles inside hierarchies like school systems, or universities. Fundamentally though all those job titles describe professionals with a passion for learning. Professional teachers.

In honor of Teacher’s week here in the US we’re pausing to add our thanks, and our thoughts about those who choose learning and development professions.

Put simply, teacher’s of every kind are superheroes. They’re all wielding and sharing the immense super power of Emotional Intelligence for their students of any age. If you’re in primary or secondary education, the term you hear most may be Social Emotional Learning. Again, perhaps the label is less important than how we can use the central concept to power and inform our work.

So if children and students are the future, then teaching is time travel. With EQ as a super power, on a time travel adventure, do we really need Avengers, and X-Men, and Jedi to be enchanted? Sure we do, because teaching, like narrative fiction, is also about finding joy in the adventure. Truth be told though: teaching is at least as adventurous as fictional cinematic universes full of heroes. If you know how to see the action that is.

So to all you teachers: our hats are off to you, and our hearts full of gratitude. Here too in tribute is our list of the top seven EQ competencies of Professional Teachers. We find this framework as inspiring and informative as it is powerful in fueling our approach to developing EQ in those we teach, train, and coach: